Apple earned an estimated $2.2B+ in operating profits in CQ411 – at 78% gross margins – purely from upselling consumers to products with more NAND storage beyond Apple’s base configuration models. Moreover, a majority of these profits came from iPhones yet no other handset OEM has emulated this strategy…

Ironically, Apple earns nearly twice as much from reselling NAND than all the NAND suppliers combined, with NAND resale responsible for 20% of Apple’s total operating profits last quarter, at an annual run-rate of $10B+.

By comparison, Google GOOG Android phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S2 come with a single pre-specified amount of internal storage (32GB in this case) and offer users the option to add an external SD card. Good for users, not so good for Samsung’s bottom line.